Saturday, October 15, 2011

Doug Saunders nails it: Tax the Crooks!

Doug Saunders

Still wondering what the Occupation Movement is protesting about in New York, thousands of other American cities, and now hundreds of cities throughout the world?

Then read the article headed We need a global army of tax collectors in today's Globe & Mail. In it, Doug Saunders does the world a favour by calling our attention to a study which shows the vast riches hidden from the tax authorities by wealthy people living in the developed and poor countries.

Here are some extracts for you to ponder, and sprinkle into your conversation with your family, friends and colleagues for the next week or so:

But, as it happens, there’s a trillion to be found. It could easily be obtained without raising taxes: We just need to start applying our current taxes to all the money people actually earn. In fact, the debt crisis would end overnight if we did that in a concerted way.

The monitoring group Global Financial Integrity estimates that people and companies are stashing away $9.4-trillion in secret offshore banks in places such as Luxembourg, Singapore and the Virgin Islands to avoid paying taxes on it. That’s $2-trillion more than all the money held in all the banks in the United States. Taxed at 11 per cent (a fraction of what’s actually owed on it), this would yield an instant trillion.

And the problem of crooks not paying taxes is not restricted to the developed countries:

This isn’t just a problem for wealthy countries; in fact, it’s probably the biggest problem in the developing world. As Anatol Lieven observes in Pakistan: A Hard Country, “barely 1 per cent of the population pays income tax, and the wealthiest landowners pay no direct taxes at all.” As a Peshawar tax auditor told him, “If anyone took taxes seriously, I’d have the most difficult job in the world, but as it is I have the easiest.” And Pakistan, from what I’ve seen, is far from exceptional.

Poor countries, according to Global Financial Integrity, lose more than $1-trillion in tax revenues a year to tax-free offshore banks. That’s about 10 times the world’s foreign aid combined, and four or five times the annual sum that some believe would end poverty completely.

So the OccupyWallStreet protestors now have some really good ammunition to back up their general complaints about the system being broken, the 1% getting away with murder, and the 99% being shafted.

When a person has millions of dollars which they cannot spent, sensibly, why do they have to cheat to get more?????I consider myself a conserative and believe in capitolism but honesty must be a large part of the system

Malcom, it's greed, pure and simple, coupled with the lack of morals on the part of the last four presidents, Senates and Houses. Were these men and women so engrossed in their own little worlds that they did not realize that their policies were gutting America's industrial base, without at the same time enlarging the world economic pie by demanding that the other developing nations with whom free trade treaties were entered into, increase the standard of living of their own people, allow unions to protect their workers, regulate their polluters?

This gutting of American might in the name of globalization and free trade has done more damage to America's strength than any number of Bin Ladens could ever hope to do.

And today we see the financial system back to its greedy ways, without proper regulation, and with American workers continuing to lose ground while the fat cats make more and more.

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The Euros: Notre Dame Point Zero

The Euros: Notre Dame Point Zero

The Euros: Notre Dame Point Zero

My latest book - The Euros: Notre Dame Point Zero - what is it about?

How would you rescue women and children held hostage in Notre Dame cathedral in Paris by a band of faceless, nameless and ruthless men, who have attached bombs to each hostage, and threaten to blow up the cathedral if their demands are not met?

That is the problem that The Euros face in this, the first book of the series about them.

The Euros is the name for the Euro Protection Bureau, the highly skilled, well trained super cops unit formed to protect the European Union from threats to its integrity.

With five headquarters – the Puzzle House in London, the Grooming House in Paris, the Toy House in Berlin, the Garage in Rome and the Story House in Prague - the PuzzleMaker and Headmaster, directors of the London and Paris HQs, have a limited time to find a way to make themselves invisible so that they may enter the cathedral, rescue the hostages, save the cathedral, and capture the Bad Guys.

As little children are marched to Point Zero in front of the cathedral, with flickering lights on their explosive vests, and the Headmaster is forced to go into the cathedral as a hostage, the PuzzleMaker turns to Knuckles, the leader of the Onsite Prediction Unit, to cast her knucklebones and help him anticipate the actions of the Bad Guys.

He also asks a young gypsy girl to help him, and the Gypsy takes him on a hair-raising trip through the catacombs and sewers of Paris.

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